Choose to Emerge: Part 8 of my ramblings about writing The Drama

I’m a playwright and a director.  I am not a philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, politician or anything else really but I am lucky enough to have been to College at a time when Higher Education was about just that – education.  It was not about making money and turning out identical cogs for the Machine.  And, what that meant was that I attended courses that gave me a brief oversight of all those other disciplines.  It was not for any particular career (although my degree was aimed towards teaching)  But the important thing is that when you have a snippet of those disciplines you have a place to start  to understand. A basic toolkit, if you like, that you can add to as you learn and develop.  And one thing builds on another.  If you want to know about the post-structuralists it’s handy to know who the Structuralists were and what they were up to and before them Russell and Nietzsche  and Kierkegaard.  And so on back to Plato.

And perhaps, being a playwright, I am still learning from all those ideas and discovering that what I have learnt from writing plays happens to coincide with many of the ideas that other thinkers have had. It amuses my to find that Guy Debord used the same word for the confused way we see the contemporary world through its images (La Societe du Spectacle) as I did when I used the word “Spectacle” when looking for a simpler, more direct form of theatre. As in Theatre so in the World.

EMERGENT QUALITIES

All these disciplines are descriptions and analyses of the structures of world and humanity.  They are useful in understanding how this thing fits with that thing like a sort of Lego set of human understanding.  What they never get at is the emergent fact of being human.  By which I mean that all these parts and descriptions are not the whole thing.  The whole is greater than the sum of these parts.  Humans are Things.  They are made up of atoms and quantum particles and molecules and chemicals and tissue and electrical signals firing round the nervous system but ideas and thoughts are emergent properties that cannot be deduced from these Things.  Language and the arts are emergent properties.  They emerge from actual human beings with all their good points and failings living in an actual world with all its faults and hiccups.

And, more than that, are the emergent properties of groups or crowds. The outcomes of human interactions produce entirely puzzling results.  An alien visitor could never guess the rules of football or the intention of ballet, say, by dissecting a human cadaver.

Add in everyday circumstances and these human interactions and the consequent emergent effects become bewildering.  Political parties and mass movements are the result of human interactions at a particular time or place but they still cannot be analysed from looking at the component parts:  the people, nations and proclivities involved.

The post- structuralists (Jacques Derrida et al.)say that language is not very good at conveying meaning because it is loose, imprecise and each word contains a myriad of shadows and shades which can resonate differently with every user.  Well – duh – ask any poet or dramatist and they could have told you that a thousand years ago.  Jokes work by the very imprecision of the language. Poetry relies on the ripples of meaning spreading out to engulf many images at once. When we speak we are trying to convey those shades of meaning to others.  It is that very effort of trying to match images that underlies human comunication. When we write plays we use them to convey the very imprecision of life.

At the bottom of all this is something I call Being Human.  This is what I try to understand through my playwriting.  Whether they are comedies or tragedies or farces they are all Various Descriptions of the journey through life.  We can understand more about ourselves by studying these things and we can try to modify our behaviours accordingly but there are basic qualities underneath which is always going to contribute to the abstract fact of being human.

 Being Human is an emergent property of the human being

The Drama is the art of trying to capture this emergent property and relay it through the reality of the actor.  The actor, the words, the actions of the drama are the elements from which the drama emerges as a thing in itself.

Thus, to my way of thinking, the best drama is a pure event that allows the truth of the characters to emerge from the event without imposing one view or emotion onto the audience. We let the audience observe and listen and, while the images they use to interpret the writer’s words will be vastly different, the very fact that they are watching together enables a new, shared experience to be added to their library of ideas. It is this new experience which should be allowed to grow and mature durng the course of the drama and we should avoid muddying it by importing too many pre-digested emotional cues in the form of, say, music from other sources.

The Drama needs to be Entire and True to Itself

NAUGHTY BEHAVIOUR and NICE BEHAVIOUR

Being human includes the puzzling Bad behaviour as much as it does the good.

Take gambling.  We see the pain gambling causes. Gambling is the pathological manifestation of risk taking.  But risking things - trying things out, is part of what makes human beings successful.  We are curious and experimental by nature.  We take a risk every time we cross the road. In fractions of a second we calculate the odds of That car being in the same place that were are at any particular moment in time. In the same way a child will put every toy and object it comes across in its mouth to try to identify it, we need to chew on things and ideas to see what works and what doesn’t.   But we also need to be risk-averse.  It is prudent to cross at the crossing or eat things you know are safe. And to avoid falling into the trap of over indulgence.  Human beings are made up of mutually opposing qualities.  We need both.  The balance between them is something we may never achieve.  Sometimes we need to take risks, sometimes we need to be risk averse.  Sometimes these things become pathological.  Pathology is when we favour one end of the balance despite knowing that it is a Bad Thing. Possibly because the risk gives a dose of addictive yummy endorphins while, conversely,  staying safe and secure gives  a lovely warm fireside glow of serotonin.  Beneficial behaviour and pathological behaviours are not an Either Or. We all exist somewhere on a spectrum, a ribbon, that stretches between one extreme and the other.  It is a defining feature of our individuality.

There are many of these ribbons that weave together in the make up an individual.  These ribbons are the basic character traits.

Every individual can be plotted somewhere along all of them.  There are so many of these ribbons and so many points along them that it is possible for every single individual alive in the world to be different from every one else whilst still being made of the same basic material.  Human Behaviour is an Emergent quality of the Human Being.

Yet, certain particular aspects of any wildly fictional character will still represent a fair proportion of the Human population because we are weaving them from essentially human characteristics. Even in Science Fiction and Fantasy writing we still draw from our library of observed characteristics because they are the only ones we can know. I challenge you, as a Human Being, to write a character with absolutely no human characteristics at all.

Even Daleks are Human

In a drama we can back-develop our characters by examining where on these ribbons they exist.  Are they more or less greedy, more or less brave, more or less crushed by circumstances?  When inventing a character we will select from this jumble of human characteristics and slide our cursors along the line to achieve that detail we need.  The point here is that, even though these characters might be fictional, they are still manifestations of the true nature of a human being.  And, being human, these characteristics will change over the course of the drama.

Pathologies are some of the conditions that enable us to explore different aspects of characters.  We magnify their pathologies so that we can see finer and finer detail which leads to understanding.  In my first blog on this subject I talked about hoarders and sharers and how these qualities were necessary attributes and how they benefitted the community at one end and disturbed it at the other. Pathologies are where the “What If” of drama comes into play.  What if this character tended towards this end of the spectrum more than the other?  We ask.   when, as playwrights,  we develop or create characters, we choose at which waypoints along these ribbons our characters exist.  The audience wants to see how this works out in the situation we provide. Our character is totally fictional but utterly recognisable.  The natural empathy of the audience will help them understand what it is like to be this or that character in this or that situation. without having to undergo the pain it causes themselves.  They will feel the reality of our character.  The character we create will be unlike any character they have met before but should be utterly recognisable as a human being. While watching a Drama it is though we have walked into a bar filled with strangers but among whom we we will still find recognisable folk that we might care to listen to or avoid and learn from.

In other words, human beings are so varied in their characteristics you can bet that your fictional character will still represent a fair proportion of the population.  This is because you base your fictional character on the close observation you make of the world.  It is always why your character will never be entirely satisfactory if you base it too closely on your own limited view of your own character.  It is up to the playwright to tinker about with possible human characteristics and to condense or stretch out the reality to demonstrate the point they are trying to make.

And because we wish to emphasise some of these characteristics for the sake of the drama we nudge them along their ribbon towards one end or another in response to the circumstances we  invent for them. Thus we bring them into more contrast and our audience can see them in finer detail.  But if we remember that human beings are woven from many character ribbons, we still maintain their individual truth and interest for the audience because they are still as complex as the rest of humanity.  Thus, the worst villain still loves his Mother and donates to charity whilst causing murder and mayhem elsewhere.

For me a play must always originate with the characters

Plays are not about issues.  They are about people.  Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” is not about an epidemic of water-borne disease but about the effect that has on the protagonists. People are condensed into characters that interact with one another showing how the characters develop.  Issues may be an emergent part of the situation that brings the characters together but the essential character we are looking at is not defined by any issue they may have.

One of the most important aspects of life that manifests itself on the stage is that of status.  Status is not just about a single place in Society, it is principally about the power that an individual may have at any one time in a play.  It relies on the perception of the audience to see the power gradient.  Thus someone sitting still and quiet may have a higher observable status than someone ranting and moving quickly about the stage.  Joan of Arc or Antigone may demonstrate a higher status than those who would seek to torment them.  At the same time Status may shift between the protagonists of a scene from minute to minute as their interaction progresses.  Status is one of those things that manifests itself in the unspoken gaps between the words. And who holds the higher status at the end of the scene may be said to have “Won” it.

Perhaps I’ll return to this in a later essay.  Suffice it to say here that an understanding of the relative statuses of your characters is an Emergent quality of being human and is, thus, fundamental to their creation.

What are the emergent qualities of Being Human that interest you as a writer? Comment below if you care to.